


Songs for the Front Row

by Glinda



Category: Leverage
Genre: Arson, Childhood, Coming of Age, Crimes & Criminals, Explosions, Foster Care, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gang Violence, Grief/Mourning, Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Torture, Medical Experimentation, Military Background, Multi, Organized Crime, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-06-26 07:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15658488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Don't get yourself lost because you're following someone else's song





	1. Hate This Place

**Author's Note:**

> I started doing that 'put your iTunes on shuffle and use the first ten songs as prompts' memes, and then I realised they sort of worked as a interlinked series of stories. Most of the stories are set pre-canon, as an exploration of the people each of the team were before they came together as a team.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who knows where you've been? Parker and the things she left behind.

The first crime Parker commits, no one ever suspects her of having committed. 

She isn’t called Parker then, and, in fairness, anyone who knew her old name probably thinks she was killed in the explosion. She arrived at that placement with a little backpack with all the clothes she owned and her bunny, and she’s walked out the door with those same things. Anything else she left behind wasn’t worth keeping. 

Between the delight of the explosion and the thought of what name she’ll pick this time, it’s easy to look innocently cheerful as she walks straight past all the concerned adults the sound of the explosion brings running. She’ll be on a train, nearing the county line before her smile begins to fade or anyone thinks to look for her. 

She doesn’t look back.

~

Sixteen foster homes, a couple of years work as a getaway driver and a stint in Juvenile detention later, she is officially done with the system. Being homeless is harder in some ways and easier in others. The rules are unspoken and the violence is often arbitrary, but the patterns are clearer, and fundamentally that’s easier to manage. She learns quickly that the shambling, muttering, filthy ones are far less dangerous than the ones in cheap suits with sharks’ smiles. Hope is a dangerous thing, it makes those afraid of losing it vicious. 

Chicago winters are cold, and it makes her clumsy, which is how Archie catches her in the first place. Just her luck to pick the pocket of a professional art thief. She ought to be afraid, but she isn’t. Perhaps the cold has made her stupid, but she doesn’t think so. His smile makes her think of old movie stars rather than sharks. 

“Got everything?” Archie asks. 

She shows him her bunny, her lock-picks and her most defiant expression. 

He gives her a strange smile, that over the years she will come to think of his smile for her alone. (A very long time later she will realise that is his conflicted smile, half fond, half sad. It nonetheless will always belong to her.) He offers her his hand and she takes it. 

She doesn’t look back.


	2. The Flame Still Burns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fear and the cost, of a paradise lost in frustration. Nate & Maggie, before and after.

Nate always promised himself he wouldn’t lie to Maggie. Not about the important things. He never made it out loud, never told her about it, because it was as much about him as it was about her. It was about not being his father. About the lies she had believed and the lies she’d let him think she believed. He remembers the hurt and grief on her face, the way she’d hid it from his father, the way she couldn’t hide it from him despite her best efforts. He never wants to hurt anyone he loves like that. 

It’s not as though they never lie to each other, but they are the white lies of shared living. Not insulting each other’s dubious fashion choices or kitchen disasters. They both understand client confidentiality so on the rare occasions that they need to lie to each other about work, they know that they’re really lying to themselves about what happened. Mostly if he lies to Maggie about work it’s more about the storyteller in him coming to the fore, turning grubby messy little jobs into glamorous daring adventures. 

The problem with all this, of course, is while he’s never told her about that vow, she’s come to believe it. Maggie believes that her husband is an honest man, and so Nate is an honest man. It’s a reputation that comes to define him, and to haunt him. Because the biggest lie he ever tells her, is to protect her, and she never doubts him for a moment. Every time someone calls him an honest man it hurts, because he knows otherwise, that he’s lied to the best, most honest woman he knows. He failed Sam, but he knows logically that that wasn’t actually his fault. But this? This one is all on him. 

When he finally does tell her the truth, it’s written all over her face, that familiar grief and hurt he’d promised himself he’d never cause her. But because he’s not his father, he doesn’t run from it, he faces her rage, knows he deserves whatever she throws at him. Instead, armed with the truth, she turns on the people who are truly to blame and even in the face of everything she learns and having her whole world-view overturned, she is utterly and completely on his side. They couldn’t have pulled the job without her, and watching her stare down Blackpoole, he can count on one hand the times when he’s loved her more. 

(Afterwards, he sometimes wonders, how much happier his parents might have been. If his father had been honest with his mother, if he’d given her the opportunity to be truly loyal to him. Not just faithful and true, but a real ally against the world. Perhaps nothing would have changed but perhaps everything would have.)

She doesn’t love him any more, but she gives him something that is somehow more precious. She likes this new him, unfinished and damaged though he is, she prefers the messy truth to a pretty lie. 

It gives him hope that maybe one day he could like that person too.


	3. Die Like a Rich Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Won't die in the bony arms of the state. - Alec's Nana wants something better for him, Alec wants something better for her too.

Nana’s fridge is covered with photos and postcards, some old and faded, some crisp and new. Dozens of Polaroids, of every kid that passed through her kitchen over the years. Arrival and departure dates written along the bottom, sometimes separated by weeks and sometimes by years. There are other pictures too, proud young parents holding tiny babies, college graduation photos and military passing out photos. A collage of the lives touched and supported over a long career in foster care. A silent reminder to each kid that sits at the kitchen table that this can be their home too, that they aren’t doomed to repeat their parents’ mistakes. 

Alec stays with Nana longer than most of her kids do. So he gets to see the other side of that collage on the fridge. He gets to see the book. 

It’s just him staying at the moment – a convenient lie between themselves and the state, he’s taking care of her as much as she’s taking care of him right now - and when he comes downstairs he finds Nana dressed in a crisp black church dress. When she looks up, her face is lined with grief and he presumes it’s a friend or relative’s funeral. She doesn’t quite ask him to come with her, but he goes upstairs and changes into the only suit he owns, she produces a black tie from somewhere and he stands very still while she puts it on him. He doesn’t ask whose tie it used to be, some questions he doesn’t need answers to.

There aren’t many mourners at the funeral. A couple of young men who, if he saw them on the street, Alec would have desperately hoped not to be noticed by, who nonetheless can’t meet Nana’s fierce gaze. A young woman, skinny, with hollow eyes who clings to Nana’s hand for a long moment before she flees, the echo of ‘thank you’ trailing in her wake. The pastor nods his acknowledgement to Nana and his approval at Alec as he lingers at her elbow. Later Alec will wonder how many funerals the pastor has conducted over the years where Nana’s attended as the sole mourner. 

Afterwards they take a walk around the graveyard and she points out various plots and grave markers to him. He goes and fetches a bunch of carnations from a neighbouring florist, and some of the places she leaves a flower haven’t so much as a cross to mark them. She knows though, can give him dates and names, causes of death, a litany of remembrance. 

When they get home again, before Nana goes for her ‘rest’, she gets him to take down a big leather-bound book from the top of one of the cupboards. He’s seen her use one like it before, a house-hold ledger, every last dollar accounted for, squeezing every last nickel and dime to get the best value possible, to somehow find the money for a treat or a surprise for one of the kids. He’d presumed the others on the shelf were just old ones from previous years, but up close he can see that this one is a different shade. She handles this one carefully; a firm yet gentle touch, opening it to reveal a very different kind of ledger. She carefully notes down the details of the boy – he was 22 but Alec isn’t so young that he doesn’t realise how terribly short a life that was – her hands don’t shake, and the page isn’t stained by tears. Alec remembers when he stopped crying when he left one placement or another, when he stopped being upset and became resigned. He’s grown so used to indifferent foster parents that it’s unnerving to see the other side, to see the toll the attrition of lives takes on the ones that care. 

“We must all start to blur together eventually,” he says before he can think better of it. 

She looks up at him and the sadness and resignation in her eyes hurts it’s so familiar. He wishes he knew how to ask how she’d ended up becoming a foster parent, if she’d always done it alone. If she’d ever wanted to adopt any of the kids that came through her door. If the fact that she’s sharing this with him – his own eighteenth birthday looming on the horizon - is its own answer. 

“The first time, I looked at the picture in the paper, and I knew the boy’s face, I could remember what he liked best for breakfast, the way he refused to wear his reading glasses and the song that played on the radio the first time he sat in my kitchen. But I couldn’t remember his name for the life of me and now he was dead. And if I didn’t remember…” She doesn’t finish the sentence, just gestures at the pictures on the fridge and the ledger in front of her. “There’s so little else I can do for you when you walk out of my kitchen.”

He thinks of him own code of honour, cobbled together more from the aphorism of ‘what would Nana say if she knew’ and wonders how many other kids who’ve passed through this kitchen hold to that code. How many have made better choices, knowing that the other path would make Nana sad. How many of those photos of smiling adults on the fridge are masks over scared kids who just needed someone to be proud of them, to remember them, to care. 

She reaches out suddenly and cups his cheek with one of her hands. Her smile is wry but her eyes are terribly serious.

“Just remember, Alec, that no amount of bling will make you bulletproof.”

He sits across from her at the kitchen table, for once in his life completely at a loss for what to say. He can’t promise her anything. Even if he never commits another crime, he can’t guarantee his own safety. He could run afoul of a drunk driver, or a mugger on the L, or get stopped by the wrong police officer. 

Instead he leans into her touch and holds her gaze.

“I’ll do my best,” he tells her.

“That’s all I ask,” she agrees, before returning to her task. 

~

Somewhere in the files of Leverage Consulting, buried deep and thoroughly encrypted, is a file where Hardison records every little detail that the rest of the team let slip. It’s connected to a ring-fenced fund and a small but clever programme, to make sure that if the worst happens they’ll all get a decent funeral and that the people who truly need to know won’t have to find out third hand, or read it in the paper.


	4. Looking for (A) New England

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophie didn't want to change the world, she was just looking for...well that would be telling...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sophie's back story was partly inspired by a discussion on Tumblr about the ways in which Sophie inhabits the character of Annie Kroy during Season 2. Someone pointed out that the first time we see her be Annie, her accent changes before her body language did, as though the accent was a reaction to the violence of the situation. That perhaps Annie was a very old alias, with an accent closer to Sophie's 'real'/original accent.

On dress rehearsal night, Sophie surveys the stage in a small but well-appointed theatre in central Boston, and finds it to be good. It’s far from her first time in this city, but the last time was nearly twenty years before, and she wasn’t treading the boards then. She was someone entirely different back then. 

~

The problem with being back in Boston, being back in New England more generally, is that it’s all too easy to slip back into who she used to be. Not so much with the rest of the team, she already has a pre-existing persona to play with them, to shore herself up against old ghosts. But they rub up against the organised crime syndicates of the city all to often here. Standing in a warehouse down by the docks, she feels her accent slide away from her, before she’s even consciously considered being Annie again. The moment she hears that accent from her own mouth she knows though, knows that there’s no way out except through Annie. So she pulls on Annie Kroy like an old and much loved coat, and her body remembers. And though these particular gangsters have never run into her old alias in person, she can tell that her reputation still lingers, that they remember too. She hates how easy it is to fall back into this persona, how comfortable the gun feels in her hand, the words in mouth, the way she cannot tell if she’s inhabiting Annie or if Annie is inhabiting her. 

Nate isn’t the only one with ghosts in this city.

~

_In general, Sophie prefers to avoid guns, she knows her way round them, and she can use them if she needs to, but she’s a grifter, fundamentally if she’s got to use a gun then things have gone so far tits up that all normal service has been suspended. But that’s always the thing about being Annie, she’s only ever Annie in extremis. And this, this is definitely in extremis._

_Annie stands in the centre of the room, commanding both attention and respect. Annie Kroy carries a gun, but she rarely needs to use it. In general, other people carry out the violence for her, but she’s found that a willingness to take the violence into her own hands, has an effect of binding her subordinates to her with far greater loyalty. Annie takes that as her due. It scares the heck out of Sophie._

_There is blood on the floor and the last of a long line of men she’s manipulated, threatened or straight up damaged to get here, is tied to a chair in front of her. To find the man who killed her namesake, not the one who fired the bullet, but the one who ordered it. (The woman who taught her how to be Annie, how to walk the walk and talk the talk, how to survive in this world and showed her how capable she was of something far more ambitious.) It’s a quest that has taken her across the Atlantic, and tested all her criminal skills to the limit. Annie Kroy pays her debts and this one has cost her more than most. But she’s done now. Honour is satisfied._

_(She’s doesn’t know it yet, but this gift-wrapped gangster she’s leaving for the police, will be found by a young, idealistic officer, whose discovery will set him on a path that will lead him – many years hence – to head up the Organized Crime task force.)_

_Annie is just another lie that she tells the world, but she’s an older lie than almost any of the others, and one that’s closer to the truth than all the rest of them put together._

_Sophie doesn’t remember the last time she cried. Really cried, as herself, rather than for effect. In darker moments she’s wondered if she even remembered how to do that, how to care enough about anything or anyone to cry over them. But the grief comes bubbling up from her chest, and the words bubble out of her mouth, even though the person she needs to hear those words – who needed to hear them – is thousands of miles away, and six months dead._

_“You stupid cow, you were my best friend, all you had to do was say you needed me and I’d have come home. Why the hell did you leave it so late, why couldn’t you have called when there was still time for this to count. What’s the point in vengeance when you’re not here to enjoy it.”_

_No one answers, of course, the only company she has right now, are either unconscious or dead. It doesn’t feel cathartic, it feels bloody pointless._

_No more, she promises herself, no one else will ever get close enough to hurt her like this again. To leave her bereft like this. She’s done having friends._

~

Afterwards, Eliot finds her, sits by her side, somehow both too close and too far away. She appreciates that he didn’t sit across from her, that he isn’t forcing her to meet his gaze. She isn’t quite sure what she’d see there, what she wants to see. 

“There are some people, that we are for jobs that are hard to be,” he observes, “and that can be scary. But it’s the people that its too easy to be, the ones that on the surface should be hard, but that you can slip into so easily, those are the really scary ones.”

“I haven’t needed to be Annie, in a long time,” she confesses.

“Do you not like being Annie, or do you not like how much you enjoy being Annie,” he asks, eyes carefully fixed on the horizon. 

“I miss her,” she tells him, a half-truth, “ not being her but…”

“You miss the person you based her on?” He hazards.

“She’s not any one person, they never are, but Annie has more real people in her than most of them, she’s someone…” Sophie doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, doesn’t know how to do justice to those girls from long ago and the choices they’d made. 

“She’s someone you might have been,” Eliot surmises, “someone you chose not to be. That’s what makes you uncomfortable about her. Too close for comfort.”

That’s not quite right, but it’s closer than she’s willing to admit, to him or anyone else. Especially not to herself. 

“Something like that,” she tells him, and the edge of his smile, that is all she can see in profile, tells her that he understands all too well.

~ 

Sophie buries Annie in London. She hadn’t finished the job when she’d had to go back to Boston to rescue the team, so it had been easy to pull her back on one last time. (Because she knows who her friends are, she won’t loose a single one of them because they can’t admit they need her.) But now, that she’s figured out who she wants to be, who she really is now, she needs to let Annie go, once and for all. 

She brings Eliot along for the ride, partly because she needs his muscle, mostly because she needs the other kind of strength he carries. While she’s there she takes him to visit another grave-side, in a very different part of town. There she tells him some hypothetical tales, about some long-ago girls who dreamed of the only kind of freedom and success that seemed possible to girls like them. Who became gangsters molls – and in one case a gangster in her own right, more terrifying than anything Sophie could have imagined or invented – and the price they paid in bruises and bullets. And about a woman with hard eyes and an uncompromising manner, who’d taught Sophie she was beautiful and shown her just what a powerful tool she had at her disposal. The person who’d got her out – out of the grubby world they’d come of age in, up into the world of art and light and a very different kind of corruption - but who couldn’t get herself out. That Sophie hadn’t realised needed her help in turn, until it was far too late.


	5. Take Me To The Farm (I Don't Want to go Back)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He ain't no Peter Pan - Eliot's sort of a super-soldier, it takes it's toll.

There’s a facility, somewhere in the dessert, that doesn’t exist. Among the people who know it exists, it’s known simply as ‘The Farm’. Eliot grew up in farm country. It doesn’t look a damn thing like any farm he’s ever seen. 

~

Eliot Spencer was born in 1972. (People forget, when they meet him, that he’s closer in age to Sophie than he is to either Parker or Hardison.) He signed up at 19 years of age, in 1991. When he talks about Iraq people presume he means post Afghanistan, rather than post Kuwait. In those early days of his service he gained a reputation for calculated – rather than reckless - bravery. He also gained a reputation for being really hard to kill. The brass dressed it up in pretty words, but Eliot reckoned that Vance’s assessment the first time the two of them walked out of capture – on a badly broken foot and with internal bleeding - was closest to the truth. 

“Spencer’s just too damn stubborn to lie down and die.” 

~

Eliot doesn’t remember much about the Farm after the first week or so, and most of what he does remember doesn’t make sense. ( _A cockroach crawling out of his coffee. Waking up in the desert with a cannula still in his arm._ ) It’s supposed to be a centre for training special forces soldiers in torture resistance and exposure therapy to various of the more esoteric substances that he might encounter in his work – when your work is going where you shouldn’t be and officially aren’t, the people who capture you aren’t generally concerned with little things like the Geneva Convention. He always had a knack for resisting torture – dissociation probably isn’t healthy, but it’s really useful – and he certainly learns a lot of useful stuff during his stay, even if he doesn’t consciously remember most of it. But it’s not the holes in his memory that he worries about – that part he mostly signed up for – it’s the way he heals too fast, can physically endure so much longer, needs far more calories and far less sleep than he used to. 

They don’t talk about it, him and Vance, even though he knows that his CO had personally recommended him for the programme. They just dig bullets out of each other when they need to and cover for each other when they heal too fast or sleep too little, or need more damn calories right this minute. The closest they get to talking about it is the quiet lecture Vance gives him about getting bullet wounds seen to quickly, when he has to actually cut Eliot back open again to get one out after he’s healed around it. Blood poisoning is no fun, Vance assures him, and lets him see that he knows from experience. This is who they are now, something slightly more than human, an elite of a different sort, a very different band of brothers. 

It’s a big part of the reason, after he’s done his nine years, he agrees when Vance asks if he wants to continue serving his country, why after everything he calls the man his friend. In his own strange way Vance will always have his back, even if it hurts or doesn’t make sense at the time, he knows Vance is looking at the long game and it mostly works out in the long term. 

~

Long term though, it’s really not the physical changes that take their toll. Though it’s certainly a nuisance having to keep out of normal hospitals, and once he’s part of Leverage it’s a pain trying to keep track of how long it _ought_ to take him to recover from any given injury. But it’s the psychological impacts that are harder to take. The improvements to his already photographic memory that mean that nothing fades away, that he remembers – he literally _can’t_ forget, no matter how much he might wish to – all the terrible things he’s done, as though they were last week rather than last decade. Being able to survive things that would kill most other people is one thing, realising that you might survive everyone you care about dying is a whole other ballgame. He could have cried with relief the first time he discovered a grey hair, confirmation that he was actually still aging not just getting weather-beaten. Parker’s nine years younger than him, while Alec is three years younger than her, will it be enough? If he succeeds in his task to keep them alive for long enough to actually retire, will he still have to outlive them?

Nate doesn’t know how close his little fiction for Agent Casey – with Eliot dying in the back of Lucille, safe in the arms of his team – was to Eliot’s own best hope for his own end. If there’s an afterlife, then he knows he’s not going where they are, so he’ll savour each moment he gets with them. Good, honourable work, the friendship and respect of people who truly know him, and a little peace, the closest to paradise a man like him can hope for.


	6. Nobody Does It Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's some kind of magic, that keeps them from running - they all have something in common, other than being the best at what they do and preferring to work alone.

The thing is, that Alec Hardison has gotten used to being the smartest guy in the room. Has grown accustomed to that being something that pisses off anyone else he works with, makes them sloppy and resentful, instead of causing them to raise their game. 

This job though, this job is different. He did his research before-hand, he knew that Dubenich had hired the three of them because they were the best at what they did. But reputations can lie, and there is definitely such a thing as false advertising in their line of work. However, from that first con, even before the explosion and everything after, it’s clear to him – to them all, if they’re honest with themselves – that they are each as good as they’re cracked up to be. By the time they’ve escaped from the hospital – and oh that moment with the phones, when he’d looked at Parker and she’d looked back at him, there’s not a lot he wouldn’t give to have that moment of perfect understanding, again and again - and taken refuge in Hardison’s apartment, another truth has emerged. They don’t work alone out of preference alone. The moment they have colleagues who can actually keep up, they’re getting in each other’s space and competing to impress each other. (He would also like to point out, that while he taught Parker and Spencer all the IT jargon they’d need for the scam, he most definitely did not teach Spencer any Klingon, much less _situationally appropriate_ Klingon.) They are all as lonely as each other.

Afterwards, they all stand in the plaza, looking at each other, and he feels it, that they’re all hanging on the edge of something. One of those moments when you realise that the decisions you make here will completely change your life. Yeah, they’re all the best at what they do, but together, they could be so much more. And they all know it, it just needs someone to say it, to put what they’re all thinking into words.

“I already forgot your names,” Parker repeats and he can hear it there, the truth they’re all trying to hide from. That if they walk away from this, they won’t be forgetting about it and they will always regret it. Nate bolts, and Sophie makes an equally swift exit, but Parker clips his shoulder as she passes him, and he knows damn well that she’s too good for it to be an accident; he doubts anyone ever touches her without her actively allowing it. So he turns on his heel and meets her gaze unhesitatingly, she tips her head after Nate and he nods in agreement and they head after him. He doesn’t see Spencer turn from his own path, but he isn’t remotely surprised to hear him fall into step with them. They don’t discuss it, they don’t need to, united by a shared purpose – this is too important to fight about. They need to convince Nate, persuade him that he needs them like they need him. And the minute Sophie shows up ahead of them, he knows they’ve won. 

They’re going to be the best crew in the country, on the planet. It’s almost enough to make him feel bad for the people they’re going to be going up against. 

Almost.


	7. Strong Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On being used she could write the book, but very few people want to hear about it - Parker recovering and finding people who'll listen.

One of the first things that Parker learns when Archie sends her out into the world at the end of her apprenticeship, is that she doesn’t work well with teams. It’s not as though its that much of a surprise to her – social workers have been writing politer versions of ‘does not play well with others’ on her notes for as long as she’s been in the system – but she’d always worked well with Archie, and so she’d presumed it was something that changed in adulthood. It turns out, however, that the vast majority of other people, cannot deal with her long-term. She can fake something appropriate if she needs to, but the majority of people she works with those first few years, are nowhere near good enough for her to want to build the kind of professional relationships that would be worth faking it to maintain. So she just stops bothering. Instead she takes advantage of other people’s assumptions to weave an identity that suits her – if people think she’s crazy, well then she’ll be crazy, make it a shield and armour against a world she doesn’t understand and that doesn’t understand her. (If they don’t want to bother to understand her, why should she bother trying to understand them?) It keeps people at a distance and she prefers that, it’s safer that way, if people don’t know her, they can’t hurt her. Besides, they’re not good enough to keep up with her, so they’d only slow her down, and slowing her down will only get her killed. 

When she was younger, Parker did some pretty terrible things to stay alive. They were necessary, and she doesn’t regret them, though she certainly wouldn’t do them again unless her life was at stake. (There is a difference between can and should, she understood that even as a child. She’s a criminal not a sociopath.) As an adult though, she understands that if people knew the things she’s capable of they’d be terrified of her. She discovers that is she thinks about doing those things to the person in front of her and smiles, it has pretty much the same effect. 

Parker is alone, but she is not lonely, in her own way she is free. 

~

Spencer thinks there’s something wrong with her, makes no secret of it. It doesn’t bother her, because she’s always known that people think that, sometimes _she_ thinks that it’s true. 

The stuff with her brother really gets to her, as though someone had opened up her brain and seen straight to her oldest and guiltiest secret. She feels flailed open and utterly vulnerable, but her team don’t act like she’s crazy. They’re gentle with her, the way they are when someone’s been shot or something has pressed Nate’s buttons about Sam. As though her feelings are entirely valid – as though she isn’t messed up and ‘crazy’ – and her response is entirely reasonable. The vengeance that Nate offers is deeply satisfying, but in darker hours she clings to the memory of Eliot’s offer. Hears in that quiet offer an unspoken promise, that all she needs to do is tell him the names of all the people who hurt her and he would hunt them down for her. She doesn’t need him to do it; it’s enough for her to know that he would do it, and him to know that she will never ask. 

It’s after that that she learns that there’s a mask that Eliot wears. That underneath it, he’s just as damaged as she is - albeit in a completely different way - that he’s just better at hiding it from the world, that he had some kind of stable baseline to try to get back to. 

They are alike, she and Eliot, and she learns to hear the truth under his rough words. (That someone hurt them both, someone broke them and the people they are now, are built from the shreds of the people they used to be.)That when he says, there’s something wrong with her, he means there’s something wrong with them. So she covers his back, as he covers hers and doesn’t need to tell him, that if he wanted she’d kill his monsters if he asks, because he’ll never ever ask. 

(Nonetheless, she will stand in an empty corridor, in an underground jail, and she will smile her special smile at Damien Moreau and choose just the right words to ensure that he has nightmares, without ever needing to lay a finger on him.)

~

Hardison doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her. Actually, from fairly early on in their working relationship, it’s fairly obvious to her that he may well think she’s crazy, but that isn’t a bad thing in his eyes. (It will be literally years later before she understands that fear of heights is an actual thing, and that mostly he thinks she’s crazy because he’s scared of heights and she loves them. What it means that he follows her off the edges of buildings despite his fears, is terrifying in an entirely different way.) Some of that is undoubtedly the shared experience of foster care – despite his considerably more positive experience, he gets it in a way that the others can’t. 

She and Alec are a team, almost from the get go. Despite his obvious crush, he never lets that get in the way of his pursuit of what is clearly far more important to him; their friendship. To the great frustration of her team-mates she continues to insist that Peggy is Alice’s friend – as much as she likes Peggy, Peggy is friends with a person that Parker puts on and takes off like a favourite coat. A composite person, a work in progress, that Alec built as much as she did. They debate Alice’s hobbies and argue about her backstory, and sometimes Eliot and Sophie weigh in too. It’s fun being Alice, but she’s not her. Peggy doesn’t know Parker. One day she’d like to be someone that she can introduce to Peggy, one day she’ll be a whole person, but she isn’t yet, she’s still under construction, and not yet ready to let anyone but her team see her vulnerable like that. She’s never had a real friend, not as an adult, and if she has to pick someone to consider her first real friend, then she picks Alec. 

(Years later she will ask Sophie, is that love? When you look at someone and think, you, I pick you. For the rest of our lives. Sophie talks around it and uses lots of fancy and confusing words, about sex and romance. Nate, in a rare moment of emotional honesty will simply tell her yes. He won’t even prevaricate about different kinds of love. Instead he’ll tell her that the moment he knew he was going to ask Sophie to marry him was when he admitted to himself that he would always choose her.)

Parker doesn’t need anyone. She’s strong and fast and clever, she’ll be just fine on her own. But she doesn’t need to be. She has a team now. They have her back and she has theirs. This is the choice she makes, every day to do this work, with these people, knowing that they make the same choices too.


End file.
